Princes and Thieves on DVD

Re-watching “The Thief of Bagdad,” released today in a glorious Criterion DVD transfer, is not unlike rereading “Treasure Island.” Conceived to enchant children, they both requite the adult longing for formative influences that withstand disillusionment and fashion. Unlike “Treasure Island,” an exemplary display of English prose and plotting, with one of the finest first sentences in fiction, “The Thief of Bagdad” (1940) occasionally sputters, losing tempo and continuity; yet it, too, survives as a model of its kind, reveling in cinematic craftsmanship — not least the then-novel techniques of color and trick photography — and boasts one of the most magisterial opening shots in cinema.Whereas “Treasure Island,” however, was solely the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, “Thief” is an auctorial anomaly even by movie standards, with so many artists and artisans — including at least six directors — working on it that only the producer, Alexander Korda, could have known how all the parts would fit. In the credits, Korda’s name comes first and last, and the directors are buried midway.The first nine minutes are riveting: the opening shot of a ship bucking the waves, a closing in on the great eye painted on its hull (the colors radiantly saturated), a cut to the eyes of the malignant wizard and vizier Jaffar (Conrad Veidt), whose face is otherwise hidden in a red turban, and then a montage to show the dock workers preparing for the ship’s arrival, singing a Miklós Rózsa song that introduces the concept of purity. The sea is hard, but pure and clean, because men are few and far between. Jaffar descends the plank to a foreboding 12-note theme. The first lines of dialogue establish the circular issue of power, as he asks an assistant, “Have you news for me?” “No, master.”Just about every relationship in imperialist and horror movies involves master and servant, with masters often answering to greater masters. Ahmad (John Justin), the king deposed and blinded by Jaffar, is “servant of the all highest but master of all men.” Ahmad introduces himself to his beloved princess (June Duprez) as “Your slave” — each is subject to the other. Even the contented boy Abu (Sabu), the thief of the title who prizes his freedom above all, enters into a game of master-servant exchanges when he uncorks the malevolent genie (Rex Ingram) — one of two scenes actually drawn from “The Thousand and One Nights” (in this case the third and fourth nights). Abu is about to hurl the genie into the sea when the imprisoned spirit utters the magic word: “Master!” How can a thief, previously referred to contemptuously as “master of a thousand fleas,” resist that? Accused of ingratitude for his release from the bottle, the genie bellows, “Slaves are not grateful — not for their freedom!”Abu ought to know. During a 37-minute flashback, he and Ahmad are arrested. As the narrator points out, “Only little thieves are thrown in prison.” Big thieves run the state, chief among them being Jaffar, who appears at one point with his sword draped by his flowing black cassock, suggesting a large tail. Jaffar turns Abu into a dog and blinds Ahmad, as his own eyes grow round and translucently blue. Ahmad’s eyes, however, will “bear witness” — a phrase that reverberates in the Christian Bible and the Koran and was especially resonant in the 20th century. The princess’s father, the Sultan of Basra (Miles Malleson, who wrote the screenplay), prefers toys to uncontrollable subjects, and walks as jerkily as his mechanical playthings, blithely referring to the beheadings he routinely orders. He placates Jaffar by trading his daughter in return for a flying horse (adapted from Scheherazade’s tale of “The Ebony Horse”); another toy will take his life. The flying horse will similarly facilitate Jaffar’s undoing, as Abu brings him down with the “arrow of justice.”Some of the blue-screen effects and model work in “The Thief of Bagdad” are dated, but the overall display of pastel colors, magnificent sets, and creative energy subsumes them. One episode, in which Abu claims the all-seeing eye, show an oneiric inventiveness that spawned many images of 1950s cinema. The statue, for example, is shot in a montage of angles that anticipates Alfred Hitchcock’s approach to Mt. Rushmore in “North by Northwest.” The themes of subjugation and obsession — along with the images of a giant spider and giant squid — would become equally familiar during the postwar era.Instances of these themes abound in four movies produced by Hammer Films, perhaps the only studio name that reignites the adrenalin of those who began attending movies in the 1950s and early 1960s. These films were frequently censored and reviled for their violence and sexuality, inciting revulsion in England, where they were made. Here they were the stuff of Saturday matinees — not family films, like “The Thief of Bagdad,” but fare for adolescent boys who could scarcely believe (I bear witness) the sadism, the colors, and the bosomy extras.Four overlooked examples are collected by Columbia in the “Icons of Adventure” set, each of them rehearsing the same themes of master and servant, appeasement and betrayal, destructive obsession, and the decline of empire. Terence Fisher’s “The Stranglers of Bombay” (1960), the only of the four in black-and-white and the only one lacking a shivery lead performance by Christopher Lee, is an extrapolation of the Kill for Kali episodes in “Gunga Din” (1939), only with the absence of a hero.Harry Lewis (Guy Rolfe), who is introduced patting an Indian boy’s head, is merely the least objectionable of an arrogant lot of soldiers and organizers of the 1830s British East India Company. The drum-playing Thuggees are frighteningly fundamentalist worshippers of Kali, who is represented by a statue with Churchillian V-shaped fingers. They strangle indiscriminately, slit tongues, and gouge eyes, and are only marginally less appealing than the Brits, with their equally unquenchable greed and old-school ties. The highlight is a fight between a cobra and a mongoose worthy of a Disney True Life Adventure, and overseen by a slave girl (Marie Devereux) who has no dialogue or credit, just famously heaving breasts.Anthony Bushell’s “The Terror of the Tongs” (1961) switches the imperialist game to 1910 Hong Kong, where the Red Tong creates suicide killers. Instead of getting virgins in the next world, these men get all the opium and hussies they can handle the night before they go on a mission. “All passion spent,” Mr. Lee’s Fu Manchu-type tong leader tells them, “your spirit shall be shining and pure.” The film, originally shown in American theaters in black-and-white, was photographed and art-directed (note the juggler who accompanies the shake dancer) with shimmering Hammer colors, here solidly reproduced. The story is strictly pulp — Captain Sale (Geoffrey Toone), whose 16-year-old daughter is murdered, destroys the “inviolable” tong by storming around Hong Kong in his pea coat, unarmed but for his ready fists. The tong has no chance; neither do any of the women in Sale’s life, all sacrificed to the mission. Sale is called master in his home and the tong leader is called master in his lair, though the latter answers to grandmasters in Peking. In the absence of Ms. Devereux, the film is best remembered for the way Mr. Lee leans forward and asks Sale, conversationally, with his bass baritone, “Have you ever had your bones scraped, captain?”Two rarely seen pirate films, John Gilling’s “The Pirates of Blood River” (1961) and Don Sharp’s “The Devil-Ship Pirates” (1963), also deal with religious fanatics, but these are strictly British Christians. In the former, they sacrifice a woman to a bay of piranhas and sentence the hero (the very un-British Kerwin Mathews) to a prison camp. Interestingly, he really is guilty as accused, and it is he who first appeases Mr. Lee’s pirate band by offering the sanctuary of his intolerant hometown. His father, who runs the village, and the pirates are equally willing to kill everyone else for a hidden treasure.Finally, “The Devil-Ship Pirates” brings out the quislings in a British coastal town when pirates pretending to be members of the Spanish Armada convince them that England has been conquered. The town leader offers them free use of the town in the hope that they are reasonable men and will go away. But there are no genies in Hammer films and no reason for hope.

Princes and Thieves on DVD

Princes and Thieves on DVD

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